renice(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | FILES | NOTES | HISTORY | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY

RENICE(1)                     User Commands                    RENICE(1)

NAME         top

       renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS         top

       renice [--priority|--relative] priority [-g|-p|-u] identifier...

DESCRIPTION         top

       renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running
       processes. The first argument is the priority value to be used.
       The other arguments are interpreted as process IDs (by default),
       process group IDs, user IDs, or user names. renice'ing a process
       group causes all processes in the process group to have their
       scheduling priority altered. renice'ing a user causes all
       processes owned by the user to have their scheduling priority
       altered.

       If no -n, --priority or --relative option is used, then the
       priority is set as absolute.

OPTIONS         top

       -n priority
           Specify the absolute or relative (depending on environment
           variable POSIXLY_CORRECT) scheduling priority to be used for
           the process, process group, or user. Use of the option -n is
           optional, but when used, it must be the first argument. See
           NOTES for more information.

       --priority priority
           Specify an absolute scheduling priority. Priority is set to
           the given value. This is the default, when no option is
           specified.

       --relative priority
           Specify a relative scheduling priority. Same as the standard
           POSIX -n option. Priority gets incremented/decremented by the
           given value.

       -g, --pgrp
           Interpret the succeeding arguments as process group IDs.

       -p, --pid
           Interpret the succeeding arguments as process IDs (the
           default).

       -u, --user
           Interpret the succeeding arguments as usernames or UIDs.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Print version and exit.

FILES         top

       /etc/passwd
           to map user names to user IDs

NOTES         top

       Users other than the superuser may only alter the priority of
       processes they own. Furthermore, an unprivileged user can only
       increase the "nice value" (i.e., choose a lower priority) and
       such changes are irreversible unless (since Linux 2.6.12) the
       user has a suitable "nice" resource limit (see ulimit(1p) and
       getrlimit(2)).

       The superuser may alter the priority of any process and set the
       priority to any value in the range -20 to 19. Useful priorities
       are: 19 (the affected processes will run only when nothing else
       in the system wants to), 0 (the "base" scheduling priority),
       anything negative (to make things go very fast).

       For historical reasons in this implementation, the -n option did
       not follow the POSIX specification. Therefore, instead of setting
       a relative priority, it sets an absolute priority by default. As
       this may not be desirable, this behavior can be controlled by
       setting the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT to be fully
       POSIX compliant. See the -n option for details. See --relative
       and --priority for options that do not change behavior depending
       on environment variables.

HISTORY         top

       The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.

EXAMPLES         top

       The following command would change the priority of the processes
       with PIDs 987 and 32, plus all processes owned by the users
       daemon and root:

       renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32

SEE ALSO         top

       nice(1), chrt(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2), credentials(7),
       sched(7)

REPORTING BUGS         top

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
       https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY         top

       The renice command is part of the util-linux package which can be
       downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page
       is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
       utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have
       a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       [email protected]. This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in
       this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
       send a mail to [email protected]

util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad      2023-07-19                      RENICE(1)

Pages that refer to this page: chrt(1)coresched(1)kill(1@@procps-ng)nice(1)skill(1)taskset(1)uclampset(1)getpriority(2)nice(2)